


Together

by ohwise1ne



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fix-it fic, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Sort Of, TRoS Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:09:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21887221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohwise1ne/pseuds/ohwise1ne
Summary: Rey searches for Ben in all the moments they shared together.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 25
Kudos: 146





	Together

**Author's Note:**

> **TROS spoilers.**
> 
> Hey. I've been in a bit of a daze after seeing the final movie. I had... a lot of issues with it. But the thing that keeps haunting me the most is that they didn't even begin to touch the grief Rey would have felt after losing her other half. Here's my sad short take on one way they could have ended up back together. 
> 
> I'm feeling pretty empty and this might feel a little rushed, but it can't possibly be as empty or rushed as TROS was, so here you go.

Beneath the canopy of whispering leaves, Rey closes her eyes and remembers.

It's hard to focus, with the vibrant hum of life all around her. But she still manages to narrow her vision, skipping through the sprawling maze of all the living things that inhabit this forest—searching for the trace of one being in particular.

She closes her eyes— _there_ —and reaches, searching, and sees—she  _ sees— _

Herself.

She sees herself.

The image is hazy, but the edges grow clearer by the second, along with the racing thoughts that first accompanied it. A girl. There is a girl, standing frozen in the brush. She is—young. Too young for the weapon of death she clutches in her fingers. Too young for the practiced way she holds herself utterly still, making herself invisible—the same way a young Ben Solo once did against shadowy walls that echoed with the fury of his parents’ disagreements.

A thousand light years away, Rey’s heart is racing. She takes a few stumbling steps forward, feet crunching against distant twigs, reaching, hoping for—

_ A streak of a red blaster. The rapid rise and fall of her chest. The fear in her eyes, along with the spark of recognition  _ (Ben) _ of an impossibility that even he had not allowed himself to consider— _

Her chest constricts as she  _ feels it. _ The weight of her body, so soft and warm in his arms. 

_ He had never held another person before. _

Standing in his footsteps, Rey squeezes her eyes shut tighter and whispers:

" _ Be with me. Be with me. Be with me _ ."

The memory of Ben Solo is still cradling her when Rey opens her eyes to the empty forest.

She returns to her ship alone.

* * *

Even before Rey began looking for him, she knew she would end up back here.

The island seems to exist outside of space and time. It stands untouched, a constant across millennia. There is the sense that one could pluck any moment from the procession of the ages, only to climb these rocky hills and still find the air thick with the same sharp salt, the dull roaring of the waves, the serenity of the ancient forces that slumber in the bones of this timeless place. 

Sitting in the crumbling hut, Rey sinks into the only moment that matters to her.

Firelight flickers across the walls. The scent of rain mingles with the sea salt outside.

Ben's eyes are black and molten as they stare into her across the fire.

Luke had recoiled from her, revolted, when Rey first shared her awareness of that second secret heartbeat, pulsing deep within the island and beckoning to her own. But Ben is unflinching as she lays out her blackest thoughts and fears before him. His gaze doesn't slam shut, but instead grows more infinite, enveloping her. Making her feel safe.

Understood.

_ I've never felt so alone. _

The hut is now cracked open to sky, but Rey still reaches across the rain-weathered floor as she once reached for Ben Solo, more vibrant and lush than she had ever seen him.

_ Be with me. Be with me. Be with me. _

Distantly, she almost hears his voice responding to her.

But when she opens her eyes again, she is still alone—even more than the first time he was cruelly yanked from her in this very same spot.

This time, it is Rey who destroys the hut in a burst of agonized rage, the ghost of an unreachable future still lingering like burnt sunlight in her eyelids.

* * *

When Rey finally returns to Exogol, she expects to feel fear. 

But the only fear she has is that this place, her final hope, will be as barren of him as all the others.

The planet is unexpectedly quiet. Gone are the legions of whispering Sith, along with the manic derangement of their leader, beckoning her to light her saber. As though she would have ever considered sacrificing her true family for the sake of a stranger's bloodline.

Once, Rey would have given anything to meet a member of her family. But she has not returned to mourn whatever tenuous connection she may have had to the creature who called her  _ grandchild _ before their shared powers destroyed him.

No. Something much more significant was stolen from her in the murky depths of this cursed planet.

Rey's footsteps are silent as she crosses cold stone. Everything about this planet is cold. Even colder somehow than her longest nights in the desert, her small body huddled protectively around her hand-stitched dolls as she imagined what it might feel like to belong to someone.

It's a tragedy, she thinks, that she only experienced this feeling in a place designed to rip it away from her.

Rey approaches the broken throne with the tightness in her belly growing into a fist. It was here. Here is where he stood, waiting to take everything he could from them.

And here... Rey lets her eyes fall to the cold stone before her.

Here is where Emperor Palpatine succeeded in taking the only thing that truly mattered.

Her hands tremble as she kneels, filling the space Ben Solo once did as he fell beside her limp body. It makes the wound in her heart split a little deeper, whenever she thinks of the darkness of the planet he spent his last moments.

He deserved to leave this world somewhere full of sunlight, bright like the spark that had always been leaking through the cracks of his own heart. 

He deserved so much more.

They both did.

Rey's cheeks are wet as she traces the floor with her fingers. She had seen it, when he touched her. The future they should have shared together. The decades stretching out before them. The infinite moments where he would turn his smile upon her, again and again, always as shockingly beautiful and bright as the first time.

Little had she known, she was only seeing the infinite times she would relive this same moment.

Rey is crying, but she doesn't feel the tears on her face. She is slipping into another memory, clinging desperately to the traces of them that swirl in the air here. The pain is beyond belief, but she knows that she must push through, if she is truly going to find him.

It is the last way she knows how.

He was hurting that day too. His body, of course, was battered and aching from his long fall and ascent. But the despair that had seized him upon the sight of her lying there, lifeless, was beyond any physical pain he had ever known. A sob wracks Rey's lungs as she feels the rush of his emotion, stripped of Kylo Ren's blustering fury—leaving only his naked fear of losing her.

That's what it always had been, she sees now. Not hatred. Not ambition. Not even anger.

When Ben Solo was bare of all the armor he had constructed to contain himself, there was only the fear he would never find anyone who would take him for everything he was.

"I took you," Rey says to the empty grave all around her. "I loved you."

The darkness doesn't respond.

But Rey won't give up this time. There is nothing left, nowhere else for her to go, if she doesn't find him here. She closes her eyes, runs her fingers along the seared edges of their severed bond, and remembers.

It was the best thing she had ever felt, when she pressed her mouth to his. When she finally, finally kissed him. It had been the best thing he'd ever felt, too. She had felt it that day in the bond, and she feels it now, in the memories that blend and swirl all around her. His Rey, his strong, fierce, beautiful Rey, alive in his arms and whispering his name.

Calling him home.

_ Be with me. _

It's not enough. Rey's fingers fist in the air, where she once clung to his thin sweater, the hole still gaping through where she had sunk her saber and then her life force into his breast.

Clinging to him, even as he began to disappear.

_ Be with me. _

It had been the worst thing she'd ever felt, when she realized what was happening. When the part of him that had filled her heart—always, he had always filled that place in her, before she even knew him—began to slip away, the same way he was slipping away now, a ghost in her fingers. No, not even a ghost. 

A memory.

It had been the worst thing he'd ever felt, too. The vast, infinite emptiness at her sudden absence. The weight of her body, so soft and cold in his arms. 

The weight of a future without her  _ (without him) _ in it.

And then—the abrupt clarity. The path opened up before him, crystal clear—and in an empty room, many moons later, it suddenly opens up before Rey too.

_ I know what I need to do. _

And this time, Rey knows, she will be able to do it.

The pit is as bottomless as it seemed the first time she stared into its depths. She believed Ben had died when he fell that first time. But death holds no fear for her now. 

With the memory of him all around her, she knows now that no one is ever really gone.

Rey stands at its edge, staring into the yawning darkness, and it is there that she finally hears it.  


The answer she's been searching the galaxy for, as she revisits all the places she loved him and lost him and found him again.

_ Be with me. _

So it is with Ben's memory cradling her in the forest, touching her fingertips across a fire, breathing new life into her lungs, beaming at her now, right now and always, as he reaches, reaches, reaches across the chasm, and this time Rey will take his hand, she will cherish it, she will never ever let him go—

With Ben at her side, Rey closes her eyes and steps over the edge.

* * *

When she opens her eyes again, she is someplace warm. Green. Bathed in sunlight.

She feels hands—real hands, as familiar as her own—stroking her face. Holding her as she lies in the grass.

She blinks. His face swims into focus above her, real and clear and filled with such relief and joy that it seems to be overflowing from him. Uncontainable.

"Rey," he whispers.

This time, when she leans up to kiss him, they don't stop again for a very long time.


End file.
